ABSTRACT
Claims for a ‘digital revolution’ in education have to some extent remained just that — rhetoric rather than reality, at least in schools. Although the use of mobile technologies by students has revolutionised adolescent life, schools as institutions have resisted adopting such technologies within school walls (Sternberg et al., 2007). There has also been much speculation about how literary studies and research would evolve (but not at school level — see, e.g. McGann, 2001; Schreibman and Siemens, 2008). English teachers themselves seem well-disposed to technological change and adoption (Goodwyn, 2011a) but very often are working with a pre-digital curriculum and an assessment system that would be recognisable to a teacher from the 19th century. The term ‘computer literacy’ has now been superseded by ‘digital literacy’ and some very valuable research has been done in the subject English community, investigating the potential of teachers engaging with digital literacies in their classrooms. Much of this research has focused on how such literacy may signal a shift to the visual or how the interactivity of multimodal technologies may empower the creativity of adolescents. Equally, the Death of the Book has been discussed for decades (see Birkets, 2006, for a good overview). There have, as yet, been few research projects focusing on e-readers in educational settings, and the relevant issues for English teachers not yet highlighted (see, e.g. Jones and Brown, 2011; Larson 2009, 2010).
